School of Engineering Design,
Technology and Professional Programs,
Department of Industrial and
Manufacturing Engineering,
The Pennsylvania State University,
213 Hammond Building,
University Park, PA 16802
e-mail: shm13@psu.edu

Contributed by the Design Education Committee of ASME for publication in the JOURNAL OF MECHANICAL DESIGN. Manuscript received April 11, 2017; final manuscript received February 8, 2018; published online March 23, 2018. Assoc. Editor: Katja Holtta-Otto.

Abstract

Product dissection has been widely deployed in engineering education as a means to aid in student's understanding of functional product elements, development of new concept ideas, and their preparation for industry. However, there are large variations in the dissection activities employed in education with little research geared at understanding the impact of these variations on student cognitive load requirements and, ultimately, student conceptual understanding. This is problematic because without this knowledge, we do not know what components of product dissection impact (positively or negatively) conceptual understanding of the dissected product and how this is related to the cognitive requirements of the dissection activity. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate how the type of product dissected (complexity and product power source), the virtuality of the product (physical or virtual), and the type of dissection activity performed impacted student conceptual understanding and cognitive requirements through a factorial experiment with 141 engineering students. While the type of cognitive load varied between virtually and physically dissecting products, no differences were found in subsequent levels of conceptual understanding. This indicates that virtual environments may be used as a proxy for physical environments without impacting the conceptual understanding of products by students. These results are used to develop recommendations for the use of product dissection in education and propel future research that investigates relationships between example-based design practices and student understanding outcomes.

Copyright in the material you requested is held by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (unless otherwise noted). This email ability is provided as a courtesy, and by using it you agree that you are requesting the material solely for personal, non-commercial use, and that it is subject to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers' Terms of Use. The information provided in order to email this topic will not be used to send unsolicited email, nor will it be furnished to third parties. Please refer to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers' Privacy Policy for further information.

Shibboleth is an access management service that provides single sign-on protected resources.
It replaces the multiple user names and passwords necessary to access subscription-based content with a single user name and password that can be entered once per session.
It operates independently of a user's location or IP address.
If your institution uses Shibboleth authentication, please contact your site administrator to receive your user name and password.